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They slapped hands. “Deal.”
* * *
Jack and Tara were waiting for Jaide when she returned home early from soccer practice. Stefano had walked separately and silently, glowering at her back. They didn’t talk. The storm clouds had vanished as quickly as they had come, but Mr. Carver wasn’t taking any chances. He didn’t go so far as to say that he had taken the weird weather as an omen, but she knew he was thinking it. People in Portland ignored such signs at their peril.
“What’ve you two been up to?” Jaide asked Jack and Tara in their bedroom while Stefano made himself a snack downstairs. She could tell just by looking at them that they hadn’t been sitting idle while she had been busy dealing with Stefano.
Jack explained what they had found at the house first, since that was the freshest in his mind. There had been only two construction workers on site when they arrived, and both of them had been noisily expanding the hole that would one day be a parking lot, chugging backward and forward with diggers and earthmovers. They were easy to sneak past. Tara had shown Jack how the back door had been removed and replaced with nothing but a blue plastic sheet to keep the weather out. It was useless against two determined twelve-year-olds.
In less than half an hour, they had scoured the house from top to bottom. It had taken so little time because it was immediately clear that there was nothing to find: no dropped items of significance to Wardens, no notes or scrawled messages on the walls, no hints of the house’s tragic past. There was no sign of anything they knew had been there, such as the Monster of Portland, actually the former Living Ward, which Grandma X had healed in the old house when The Evil had tried to poison it. The house had been thoroughly cleaned out — in preparation, presumably, for its renovation.
That was disappointing, but the search of the house hadn’t been in vain. While the construction workers had been out front, waiting for Tara’s dad, Jack and Tara had sneaked into the future parking lot in order to hunt for any more buried clues. While peering intently at the rough-hewn walls, Jack had felt a strange, new sensation.
He found it hard to put into words.
“It was weird,” he said. “I could see through the dirt like it was air, only I wasn’t really seeing, not in the usual way. I could just tell what was in there.”
“Was something doing it to you?” asked Jaide. “Something in the earth, wanting you to find it?”
He shook his head. “It didn’t feel weird, and that was the weirdest thing of all. It felt normal. Like when I dug Stefano out of the ground when he first arrived. Remember? I didn’t think about what I was doing. I just did it, and it felt right.”
“I reckon it’s his second Gift,” said Tara.
“You know, like Grandma X’s father’s?” Jack said. “He had some kind of architectural Gift. Maybe that’s what this is. You have Dad’s, and I have his.”
Jaide nodded. That did make sense. For now, though, she just wanted to know what he had seen in the earth.
“So what did you find?”
“Lots of rocks and roots, of course,” he said. “An old spoon, two forks, some broken pottery and rusty coins, a belt buckle, the tip of an umbrella —”
“Anything interesting?” she cut him off, sensing that he could go on for a while.
“Not a thing.” Some of the excitement ebbed from him, which she felt bad about even if she was a bit jealous. While she had been putting up with Stefano, he had been having fun with Tara.
“At least you know what your second Gift is now,” she made an effort to say. “That’s good.”
“I guess so,” he replied. Even though it wasn’t as exciting as lightning, he was quietly pleased to have something that connected him to the great-grandfather he had never met, the man who had built the twin houses right next door to each other. Maybe, he thought, that was why his second Gift had come to him there, where Joe had died. That thought gave him little joy, but it did seem fitting.
“That wasn’t the only thing we learned,” said Tara, and she told Jaide about the article they had found in Rodeo Dave’s shop.
When she reached the part about Grandma X’s blotted name, however, Tara suddenly stopped, looked into the distance as though trying to hear something far away, and said in a hollow voice, “It’s time for me to go.”
“Not yet,” said Jaide. “Your dad won’t be coming for another half an hour.”
“It’s time for me to go,” Tara repeated. She climbed to her feet and started walking for the door.
“Wait.” Jaide followed her down the stairs, with Jack at her heels. “What’s going on?”
“It’s time for me to go,” said Tara a third time, at the front door.
Without stopping to wave or even look behind her, Tara went through the door, across the garden, and out the gate.
“That was weird,” said Jack. “Do you think we should let her just go off like that?”
“You have to,” said a voice from behind them. “Apparently it was time for her to go.”
Stefano was standing in the hallway.
“Did you do that?” asked Jaide, rounding on him with her fists on her hips.
“No,” he said. “I don’t know how to.”
“Well, what’s going on, then?”
Jack looked around him, realizing only then just how quiet the house was.
“Did you see Mom and Grandma when you came in?” he asked Jaide.
“No. I thought they might be out shopping.”
“What about Ari and Kleo?”
“I didn’t see them, either.”
“Nor me,” said Stefano, going pale.
Jaide looked behind her, as though expecting to see someone standing there. Jack, too, suddenly felt as though he was being watched.
“Where is he?” he asked.
“Who?” asked Jaide, although she knew very well who Jack meant.
“The Examiner. He must be here somewhere. That’s why everyone is gone. Do you know, Stefano?”
Stefano shook his head.
“But you know what’s going to happen,” said Jaide. “You’ve done this before, right?”
“Some of it.” For the first time she heard an accent in his voice. It made him sound much younger. “I haven’t done all of it.”
“Why is that?” said Jack. “What stopped you from going al
l the way?”
Again, he just shook his head.
“Were you afraid?” asked Jaide.
Stefano’s eyes flashed. “No, of course not. I —”
Between one word and the next, Stefano vanished. There was no puff of smoke or flash of light. No sound. One second he was there and the next he wasn’t.
Jaide instinctively reached out and took Jack’s hand. She was sure it wouldn’t make any difference to what happened to them. She just needed the comfort of being with him while she could get it.
“Good luck,” she said. “See you on the other —”
Then she was gone, too, and Jack was left alone.
Oldest first, thought Jack, the heel of his right foot restlessly tapping the floor. His nervousness was hard to contain. I’m ready, he wanted to shout. Get it over with!
The light suddenly went out, and he was lying down. The change happened so quickly he was dizzy for a second. He went to raise his hands to touch his face, but they stopped hard against something wooden and solid just inches away from them. He tried to sit up and banged his head.
He tried kicking his feet. The same.
It was either so dark that his Gift couldn’t work or his Gift had stopped working entirely. The surface in front of him felt like wood but he couldn’t see it to make sure. A box of some kind. He didn’t want to think coffin.
“Help!” he shouted. His voice echoed back at him, deafeningly loud.
He tried again, this time with his mental voice.
++Help!++
There was no reply.
He imagined the earth pressing in all around him, heavy and dense, smothering his every attempt to call Jaide.
His heart was racing. This time there was no escaping the fear of being buried alive, because it looked very much as though he had been.
* * *
Jaide was falling. But she wasn’t falling down. She was falling sideways.
Tumbled and tossed by the wind, she had trouble working out exactly what was going on. She still had her arms and legs, so they hadn’t been transformed in any particular way. She appeared simply to have been moved, but where, and why? It took her several minutes to realize that she was spinning in a circle, as though in the heart of a giant hurricane. She tried reaching out to it with her Gift, but either this storm wasn’t talking to her or her Gift had been temporarily muted somehow.
